If MH370 crashed in southern Indian Ocean it wouldn't be seen or heard (average depth 11,000 feet) [View all]

[Botany]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/if-mh370-crashed-in-southern-indian-ocean-it-wouldnt-be-seen-or-heard

The southern Indian Ocean, where investigators suspect missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have come down, is one place where a commercial airliner can crash without a ship spotting it, a radar plotting it or even a satellite picking it up.

The empty expanse of water is one of the most remote places in the world and also one of the deepest, posing potentially enormous challenges for the international search effort focusing on the area, one of several possible crash sites.

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“In most of Western Australia and almost all of the Indian Ocean, there is almost no radar coverage,” an Australian civil aviation authority source said, requesting anonymity as he was not authorised to speak on the record.

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The Indian Ocean, the world’s third largest, has an average depth of about 3600 metres. That is deeper than the Atlantic where it took two years to find wreckage from an Air France plane that vanished in 2009 even though floating debris quickly pointed to the crash site.